I bite my tongue so I don’t cry until I hear the shower start, then I sit on the sofa and sob hot, heartbroken tears because he still loves me even though I don’t feel much but disdain towards me any more.
I hear Classic FM turn on next door and feel the redness in my cheeks burn deeper. She must have heard that, Harriet, me shouting, Tom’s pity, the tears that Tom – door closed on his long shower – will never know about.
I don’t care if she hears us have sex, but I care deeply if she hears me cry. This is far more exposing.
I google Harriet again, through blurred vision. I stare at pictures of her on Twitter looking statuesque and confident as she poses with colleagues at the opening of a musical. I see her toasting it with a glass of champagne. I think of my old life when I would post similarly glamorous pictures. Now, Tom inevitably finds me here when he gets in, pyjamas and stains, unwashed face and lethargy. I look at Harriet again and think how it would be impossible for me to do those types of things now; I am not capable. I am not the right shape to fit into those places.
Harriet stares back at me from my screen. There’s an oddness about London life that means you can live here, centimetres from another person, and never know them and that is okay.
Once, I cried on the bus after a bad day at work and a purple-haired South African woman with maternal eyes offered me a tissue.
It took me by surprise. My own mum isn’t maternal. She’s brusque and pragmatic and would have told me to get on with it – ‘that’s simply what the working world is like, Lexie’ – as I pined for maternal coddling.
But when it actually came? I was horrified. There’s supposed to be an imaginary wall around you in this city and it had been knocked down. And now I have the same feeling. I listen to Harriet hum along to Beethoven and think of her, hearing my sad life and wondering about me. Why doesn’t she go out? Why do they never have parties? Why does he put up with her?
This, now, is too intimate.
9
Harriet
December
I hear him come in and I turn on the radio to listen to glib Christmas hits, because hearing this man who is Luke, really, tell Lexie next door that he loves her is too much tonight, when I’ve not slept for a week thinking about the ex-fiancé who persuaded me to emigrate then abandoned me. Thinking about the fact that the Luke who used to live here, in my flat, has gone. About how there is another Luke who lives next door and a woman he lives there with, one who has taken my life and is enjoying it, more happily, more successfully than I ever could.
Tom, this other Luke, is still in his relationship; still wants to be there. I hear him laughing. I hear him being content. Unlike my Luke, this Luke has decided that this is enough for him. Lexie is enough for him. I lean against the wall and dig my nails into it so firmly that I chip the paint, and it’s only then that I realise what I am doing. Clawing my way to this other Luke, literally.
Through the wall, Tom and Lexie are Luke and I, a couple, together. And on the other side is new me, single, the remnants of what is left of a couple, not even half but maybe a quarter. I am too much, but then in other ways, I am not enough.
And then, my bad mood is exacerbated when I see an email from my brother, David, ‘checking in’. As usual, I suspect it was sent at the behest of my parents, making sure that I was alive. And, really, that anyone who was around me was alive. So, my girlfriend, Sadie, and I have bought a house, it reads, as though we caught up last week, as if I know who Sadie is.
Sleep has been difficult lately and I am suddenly exhausted, my eyes blurring at the screen enough to make me feel nauseous.
‘How can I not know who Sadie is?’ I say out loud and am shocked at the sudden noise.
I picture David, sitting on my bed as I packed around him to move to London. ‘I’ll miss you,’ he mumbled, staring at the floor, and I looked at this teenage boy masquerading as a six-foot-tall grown-up who went to work every day and rented a house. I touched his blond surfer hair gently then kissed his head. It still blew my mind that he was no longer a child.
Luke was sitting on the floor, staring at his phone. He looked up, irritated that this was taking so long but mostly that this was taking so much emotion.
‘Come and see us,’ I told David, working hard on not crying, or on being distracted by Luke. Focusing all of my energy on a grin. ‘We can go to gigs in Camden or take a trip to Paris for the weekend.’
David looked at Luke, who gave him a distant smile.
‘We’ll hook you up with some hot British girls,’ Luke said, eyes already back on his phone. ‘If that’s what will persuade you.’
I zipped up a suitcase.
Luke had loaded his own cases the week before, everything ironed and packed with precision. He showed no emotion – as he didn’t about most things – at leaving our life. He was matter-of-fact about it. Except for the long monologues about the job he already had and the myriad career benefits.
‘I can really go somewhere in work when we’re in London,’ he told me. ‘I’m going to make so much money.’
I cared more about my career than he did, there could be no doubt about that. I earned more too, though we never mentioned it. But I was rushed into the move before I could find work and Luke never once asked what my own thoughts were on London’s career opportunities.
I left the conversation alone. It was easier that way.
It was me who was most apprehensive about leaving my family, favourite takeout places and our life.
But Luke wanted it and Luke came first. Luke was more attractive than me, cooler than me, better than me. I would have chased Luke anywhere he went uninvited but incredibly I received invites. He wanted to move to the UK; I was moving to the UK.
David will never visit now and maybe that’s better. Friends – colleagues, really – are simpler than family. Less emotional. Less history. Less transparency. Less reality.
And how is London? Work? the email continues.
I delete it so I can’t reply to it maudlin and wine-fuelled at 2 a.m. when my latest batch of hire-a-friends has traipsed home.
But then to taunt myself I pull out old photos of David and me. Heads together as we lie on the sofa in new pyjamas on Thanksgiving morning as kids. Awkward teenagers with matching spots and matching grimaces on a family weekend to New York. Posing with illicit beers in our parents’ kitchen. I can’t cry this time because it is so confusing. There is so much happiness in these pictures that my face, against all instruction, is smiling ear to ear. God, I miss you, I think.
The only thing that cuts through my thoughts is Tom and Lexie. My new family, really, drowning out the old one. I do everything to drown them out too, taking a long shower, hammering at my piano, but they get through like they always do, and later, when I hear the door slam shut, I watch them out of the window, arms around each other and darting into a restaurant across the street to eat noodles and be together, still.
I open a bottle of wine and sit down at my laptop, googling Lexie, Luke, my brother, but this time the one I return to is Tom, whose surname I know owing to a sloppy postman. I know, eventually, that I’m going to have to let Luke go, but I am an addict and cold turkey is too much. Tom can function as my methadone.
Image search is my favourite and opening the folder of pictures I have of Luke, I was right, there is far more than a resemblance between him and Tom. In the hair, the before shot in an advert for hair wax, in those lazy shoulders and those gangly, endless legs. And that nose. I could kiss it, gently on the tip, and swear that Tom would know me and know my kiss.
I zoom in on Tom’s eyes. Take a screen grab of the left first, and then the right. I consider them, really look at them. These are the eyes of a man who I could love. And if I could love someone else but Luke and make a life with someone else but Luke, maybe everything would feel less dark. I would feel diluted again, like I used to feel. And maybe I could finally move on, too, from what happened.
I peer closely at my laptop, look at T
om’s eyes again. And then I start to go through all of his pictures, one by one, zooming in on body parts and details. Screen grab, save.
Sinking the last glass of Pinot Noir, my brain is whirring. Lexie. Always Lexie. Why does she get to have this life, the one that I wanted, when I worked so hard for it? When I put up with so much? Why does she get to laugh at me, while I sit through the wall, lonely? I feel a searing rage, so I open another bottle and I begin, slowly, to type. She doesn’t know what I am capable of, I think. She has no idea what I did and who really lives here, just through the wall.
10
Lexie
January
Tom isn’t away for work at all this week, so I am forced to alter my routine. I don’t want him to know that I rarely brush my teeth before lunchtime and only put on proper trousers if I’m going out.
I already worry what this version of me is doing for our relationship. So I make an effort. We eat meals together, I dab on foundation, I attempt not to talk relentlessly about having a baby. And one night, I heave myself up from the sofa and we go for noodles and a gig in our local pub, where we order gin and tonics and everything seems young and light and bright. By the end of the week, though, the bliss has abated.
‘It’s offensive that you put your clothes on the floor and expect me to pick them up,’ I hiss, belligerent, as Tom walks past.
‘I’ve not put my clothes on the floor,’ he says. ‘What are you on about?’
I march to the bedroom and return clutching a T-shirt.
‘I dropped it,’ snaps Tom, losing patience with me. ‘But if I had put it on the floor, I don’t think it would have warranted that nastiness.’
And he walks out of the flat, to the park maybe, or the pub, or to anywhere to escape me.
Maybe we’re not used to this much time together in our tiny home, maybe we’re too used to our own habits.
But then it shifts, again.
My period comes and we’re close, he’s my family again, because this is one loss we feel together, every month.
‘I think we should go to the doctor,’ I say tentatively when we’re exhausted from the sadness.
I know he’s of the mindset that we should let nature take its course and not panic – that it’s happened once, it will happen again – but this time, he agrees. Though with a caveat.
‘Can we leave it a few more months? I have so much on at work …’
And it’s this that sets me off. I don’t know my own fuse any more, it’s different now, so unpredictable, and suddenly I’m ranting, sobbing, shouting about how he can possibly think that work is more important than this, and he’s got hold of my shoulders.
‘I never said more important, I just said …’
Then he stops sharply and he folds into the sofa.
I know he is close, the closest, to crying.
His breath is shallow. His face is a sheet of crumpled up paper. It’s pressure on him, too, and I hadn’t tended to that. Incredibly, it hits me. I just … forgot. In all of this I forgot about Tom, when Tom means the most.
‘It’s just,’ he says, shoving tears furiously from his face. ‘It’s overwhelming. It feels like being a proper grown-up. And this is the first time that that’s truly happened to me.’
He tells me that he thinks I am depressed, nervously awaiting my reaction, but I agree. Yep. Depressed. There’s a relief in capitulating.
Now, I want help. I welcome it. I will ask about therapists and contact acupuncturists and invite the help from every corner where it makes itself available.
‘Let’s go to the doctor,’ says Tom. ‘You’re right. We need to move this on. It’s not doing us any good being in limbo.’
Later I lie awake, thinking about what I – or trying to have a baby – have done to him. I stroke his face, kiss his head, tell him I’m sorry, cling to this man who I love.
11
Harriet
January
I wake with a feeling so familiar that it has a regular, cushioned spot in my brain.
There is something to worry about.
I am responsible for it.
It is not right and it is not good but I did it anyway.
Last night I set up an email account, purporting to be a student called Rachel who wanted to make documentaries, and I messaged Tom. It wasn’t smutty; I know Tom – Tom wouldn’t like that. Tom has integrity. This is one of the reasons Tom will make a great boyfriend.
There was no pouty profile picture, no innuendo. I was just an earnest student who admired his work.
This morning I look over it again. It doesn’t give a hint of my being drunk and it’s only sent at 10.30 p.m., so I will get away with it. I do, most of the time.
I lose the day to email refreshing and by the time night – or the early morning – comes, my eyes are sore and I pass out on the sofa. Though, to be honest, that’s how most nights end, whether I’m alone or next to yet another naked body that won’t call me tomorrow.
The next day, though, a reply comes.
Thanks for your comments on my work, says Tom. It’s lovely to hear someone so passionate about what they want to do.
He recommends a couple of websites, offers me a contact.
I take my laptop as close to the wall as I can get, listen for sounds of life. But if they’re there, they’re quiet. Or Tom is replying on a bus, in a café. I try to picture it but it doesn’t elucidate. Tom could be anywhere, doing anything, and I wouldn’t know because he’s not mine.
Suddenly, I feel stupid. I consider never replying and simply continuing to be his neighbour. Someone who sneaks occasional looks at him getting into the elevator. A crush, existing without everything else that people think I am capable of. No danger. No violence.
Even if I do reply, I can’t do it yet, so I need to distract myself. A colleague has invited me to drinks tonight and I make a last-minute decision to go. Rachel would. She’d be putting herself out there, young, excited, keen.
I’ve had a burst of Rachel energy. I’m running on Rachel.
Harriet’s not all that different to Rachel; it’s just that she’s been screwed over. It’s made her jaded.
Then, when I head from the bedroom into my living room to grab my purse, I hear her, losing it with him, loud and clear. I pin myself to the wall. This is the most I’ve ever heard, by far. He is quiet but she is still shouting, and though I can only get the occasional word, it’s enough.
‘Fertility … doctor … priorities … work … age … men … women … unhappy … baby.’
My palms sweat with knowledge and I stay there long after they’ve fallen silent. I’m used to suffocated noise here, the hum of buses, the barely audible sounds of Lexie and Tom living life. Anger and rage may sometimes drift up from the pavement outside in the booze-soaked early hours, but in here we live measured, muted lives. Listening to shouting through the wall feels like being back in hospital.
And then, there’s the detail. It’s not that I don’t know that plenty of couples have fertility issues. It’s just that through the wall their life sounds unblemished. And that now, there is a gap between them, just large enough to squeeze myself into.
12
Lexie
January
‘Lexie!’ goes the voicemail. ‘Would love to catch up. Let me know if that freelance life of yours isn’t too busy.’
I smile, wry. It’s a school friend, Rich, who I haven’t seen for six months. It’s difficult to say why because my working days are short and erratic and filled with procrastination, and my evenings are bursting at the seams with Netflix and pyjamas and scrolling Harriet’s social media. But somehow, I mimic busy. I have time to read a bulky Donna Tartt novel in four days, but no time to catch up face to face with people I care about.
Slowly, after I left my job a year ago, meeting friends took on the magnitude of a job interview, so I began to swerve them, telling myself that this was self-care. I had left work after a year of trying for a baby to be less stressed; though, iron
ically, my stresses simply sprawled wider. I stressed about everything from my work abilities to my friendships to whether or not I was eating too much wheat and whether or not that was what was holding me back from getting pregnant.
But I thought it was all okay, because I had Tom.
Tom and I met when we were at university in London. I was working in a nightclub selling super-sweet shots for a pound a go; he was on antibiotics so not drinking. I had to walk away from him to carry on flogging the alcohol.
‘What if I give you twenty pounds and you throw the shots away?’ said Tom, not cocky, just pragmatic.
I laughed, threw back three of whatever it was that claimed to be apple-flavoured and sat back down.
I was full of the bravado of being twenty-one, skinny in Lycra now my puppy fat years had passed and slightly drunk. My dress was tiny, pale blue and strappy, the kind that seems laughable these days when I view polo necks and knee-high boots as valid going-out outfits. This was the early Noughties, though; we warmed up with cheap vodka, not cashmere socks. We thought self-care was buying ourselves a shot with our Archers Schnapps and lemonade.
‘I thought you were so out of my league,’ Tom tells me now, often.
But everything about Tom was what I wanted. I had never looked for cheeky, or bad, or sarcastic, or mean.
I wanted kind and I wanted stable. I had roots but my roots spread wide. When I was sixteen my mum and dad – an airline pilot – moved to Canada and my childhood, already an almost-version of adulthood, was very suddenly over. This isn’t a tragic tale; nothing terrible happened to me and I wasn’t orphaned or abandoned at seven. But enforced adulthood leaves a mark. I wasn’t ready, not quite. I was still battling that puppy fat and some high-level awkwardness in my own body, and I needed home-cooked meals and sofas that smelled of my mum’s perfume to give me a place in the world.
When they left, it was with an attitude of having done their parenting years. Now, we speak on FaceTime and message but I think, often, couldn’t you have given me two more years? Just to get me to the finish line instead of making me stumble my way through the last bit stunned and in shock that they had suddenly gone AWOL.
Through the Wall Page 4
